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Iris Wildthyme
|spouse = Sam Gold |first = PROSE: Marked for Life |appearances = list of appearances |voice actor = }}Iris Margaret Wildthyme (PROSE: Marked for Life) was a transtemporal adventuress who travelled the multiverse in a , often with friends, most notably her best pal Panda. (PROSE: ) She lived under the name Brenda Soobie as a 20th century Scots Caribbean singer. (PROSE: Mad Dogs and Englishmen) There was only ever one Iris Wildthyme in all the timelines and dimensions of the multiverse. (AUDIO: The Panda Invasion) Irises Iris was several entirely different people at different times. Unlike some, she didn't even pretend to be consistent about when those times were. She lived her life completely out of order. A bit like Merlin, really. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress, The Blue Angel, ) : )]] One Iris was very old and haughty. As described her, she was "rather like Edith Sitwell as she's described in the novelist Denton Welch's memoirs. A sagacious arachnid; a grande-dame glittering in a carapace of ebon pearls. It was she who called all seven Irises to the Death Zone on Gallifrey." (PROSE: ) She appeared to be huge, but only because she wrapped herself in layers and layers of clothing. Beneath, she was a thin and bony thing — as was obvious on the nude midnight walks she liked to indulge in. She lived in the North of England, in the Obverse — a place she later claimed to originate in. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) : )]] There was the Iris who described herself as "number five." She was fat and inelegant, and liked to exaggerate her size with bulky cardigans and coats. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) She looked a bit like Beryl Reid, but with lilac hair. (PROSE: ) In that body she avidly collected houses, aiming to own at least one home in every century. (PROSE: ) Iris had a hot pink ray gun she toted around and made liberal use of. She was obsessed with the Doctor even more than in her other lives. That Iris managed to outlive five of him, until she contracted a deadly disease by eating a live Kaled mutant. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) : )]] The following, sixth Iris had huge honey blonde hair and looked like Jane Fonda in the late 1960s. She was stylish and glamorous, wearing catsuits and impractical high-heeled thigh-high boots, in which she holstered the blaster she'd inherited from her predecessor. She gravitated towards the 1960s, where she worked for MIAOW defending the Earth and met celebrities like Andy Warhol and Dr Who. (PROSE: The Blue Angel, , , In the Sixties) : )]] There was an Iris — ostensibly the third — who looked like Shirley Bassey. At first she masqueraded as Bassey, but she became a famous singer in her own right, with an impressive career, under the name Brenda Soobie. (PROSE: , Mad Dogs and Englishmen) : Wildthyme at Large)]] In one body, Iris was an older woman with a vaguely Northern accent and blonde hair. (AUDIO: Excelis Dawns, PROSE: Most Horrid) She was a heavy drinker and smoker, and could often be seen with gin in one hand and a Sobranie in the other. (AUDIO: The Sound of Fear et al.) It was in this body that she had her first meeting with Panda, even if it wasn't the chronologically-first time they were together. (AUDIO: Wildthyme at Large) This Iris hated the use of violence, no longer carrying her pink blaster. (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) She had two hearts (AUDIO: The Two Irises) and two livers. (AUDIO: The Panda Invasion) Bianca was/would have been a seductive future incarnation who resented her previous selves for wasting their lives. She sang cabaret in her nightclub, and one of her waitresses compared her to "a single pale lily, decadent and funereal." (AUDIO: The Wormery) A projection of the bus who initially believed himself to be a new incarnation of Iris was called Hilary Wildthyme. He dressed in velvet and believed "his" (Iris's) and Panda's alcoholism needed to end. After finding out who he really was, he decided to help Roger the Naxian run his nightclub in Malaga, 2108. (AUDIO: The Two Irises) Biography Origins Iris talked about her mother leaving with an older man, an offworlder, when Iris was young, leaving her to grow up with a group of older, matriarchal "Aunts" in a great house in the mountains, and how after the Aunts died one by one, she travelled to her world's great city. There she planned to demand a place in their elite society. But she only found bickering old men who knew the secrets of the cosmos but would not do anything, and wouldn't let a woman like Iris in even though their president was a woman. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) These rulers lived in a place called the Clockworks. (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) Iris said that she found her bus abandoned and dying in the mountains and coaxed it back to health, (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress, Verdigris) and that it told her what to do with her life. (PROSE: Verdigris) Later she admitted that she'd actually stolen her bus. (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) The Doctor said that Iris wasn't a "proper Time Lady": she was a commoner, from somewhere like the New Towns under the Capitol. (PROSE: Verdigris) According to him, no one on Gallifrey had even heard of her, but she countered that she had "erased herself" from the records. (AUDIO: The Wormery) She claimed at times to be Gallifreyan, (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) but also that she wasn't who she claimed to be, and her home was the — a mysterious region in which Time and Space were not only not one, but never had been and never would be. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) The Doctor speculated that Iris had been retroactively injected into his past (to which she sarcastically blamed Faction Paradox) or from another reality where all the times she claimed to have met him, and which he didn't remember, really did happen. (PROSE: ) She did, in fact, meet him out of the correct sequence, which created events in his past that shouldn't technically have happened. (PROSE: Verdigris) When Iris was held captive by birds of paradise on Hyspero, who threatened to kill her if she didn't tell them stories, she told them of a life in the southern hemisphere of Gallifrey. She said she was born in the mountaintops, where she and her dozen Aunties were perpetually kept inside their house — which had hundreds of storeys — by fierce snow. She said that her favourite Aunt was Baba, who had a shawl made from the feathers of every bird her people knew, with which she could travel anywhere in the world. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Iris was born on Christmas, c. 1521. She talked about growing up in the 1530s with her brothers on a farm in the North of England. She was immortal, and over the years she changed sex five times, like Orlando. She claimed that her lover, Peggy, was reincarnated repeatedly and that Iris had to chase after her and make her love her again every time. In the 1920s, Iris lived in Berlin, and once sang in the same cabaret as Marlene Dietrich.(PROSE: Marked for Life) By the '90s, Iris lived in the North again, in the same area her family once had their farm. (PROSE: Marked for Life) This was in the Obverse. Iris was an old woman who lived in a basement flat next door to a woman named Sally. She often went by Sally's for tea and cake. They got along well because they both saw nothing wrong with talking to Sally's terrier, Canine. She kept a tatty, decaying old double-decker bus, which she referred to as "she," in the communal garden. The neighbours complained about it for years, but nothing was ever done about it. It didn't even seem possible how it got in — there were no alleys it could pass through. It just showed up when Iris did. Sally wrote a book in which she imagined Iris travelling the cosmos in her red double-decker bus, encountering Men of Glass with ruby hearts, a , a , a , savage owls, an , and a . They were set on and . Iris and Sally got drunk and Iris got the idea that she was acting as a medium to give Sally a warning: what Sally wrote was real, and by writing it she might accidentally bring the Glass Men to them. Iris drove Sally in her bus to dinner at the house of Sally's friend the Doctor, where they ate with his lodgers Fitz and Compassion. After dinner, she and the Doctor went for a nude midnight walk in the snow, as Iris often liked to do. The Doctor's calf muscle was swollen and bothering him, so Iris cut it open with an icicle and let out what was inside: a blue, winged baby boy. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) When the Doctor began putting on magic shows, Iris attended. (PROSE: Cabinet of Changes) Iris would later say that she once felt much more of a "realist." "Then, one day, I just wasn't bound by the way things were supposed to be anymore. Unhinged from time. It made me the traveller I am today." (PROSE: The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat) Adventures Iris had sex with Henry VIII and two of his wives at the same time. She was either travelling with either her grandson Steven or her nephew and niece, Jimmy and Jenny, and she'd disguised the bus as a penthouse apartment in a fashionable area just off the King's Road. (AUDIO: The Panda Invasion) In a side street in Sunderland in 1991, (whom Iris described as "a butch dyke traffic warden") stumbled on board the bus while trying to give it a ticket. (PROSE: Verdigris, PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) Time travel "her the runs," which was very inconvenient. (PROSE: Verdigris) Jenny's first trip with Iris was to ancient Mexico, where they met Montezuma. Iris angered him by stealing an important ceremonial bracelet, which she later lost. (PROSE: Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta) Iris and Jenny had an adventure (PROSE: Verdigris) with the Second (PROSE: ) Doctor in the Crystal Mines of Marlion. Iris liked to take credit for pleading for the Doctor's life to the Dalek Supreme, (PROSE: Verdigris, ) but it was really Jenny. (PROSE: Verdigris) Iris and Jenny fought the Spiritus Mundi, and sent it packing to the outer darkness. (PROSE: Only Living Girls) Iris eventually left Jenny in North East England in 1996. (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) Iris was a friend of Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart: together they encountered cephalopods in Venice and the Terrible Zodin on Mars. Iris met Mary, Queen of Scots in Edinburgh with the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, and Mary knitted her a cushion for the bus's driving seat. (PROSE: Verdigris) Iris was there when the queen was executed — although in her memory she always confused it with the movie, and the queen looked like Katharine Hepburn. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Iris spent a while as part of a witch cult, the Sisterhood of Karn; the mysticism and outfits and rites appealed to her mysterious side. At one point the Fourth Doctor had a run-in ("the perplexing case of the brain of Morbius") with the Sisterhood, who tried to sacrifice him on a pyre. Iris was there chanting "Death! Death! Death!" along with the rest of them, but she claimed she would've rescued him if it got too bad. The adventure ended with Morbius's apparent death. But afterwards, the Sisterhood's leader Ohica took Morbius (who was only wounded) to the Death Zone, where he might gain immortality. When she found out Iris had inveigled her way into the cult, she (PROSE: Verdigris) and Morbius Time Scooped several of Iris's other selves to the Death Zone. In this body, Iris was old and imperious, glittering with pearls. She was like Edith Sitwell, as described in the memoirs of novelist Denton Welch. She called together the seven Irises, (PROSE: ) one of whom — burly, haggard, and accompanied by — was on Earth working for the Ministry. (PROSE: Entertaining Mr. O) In the Death Zone, the seven Irises had to fight s, s, s, Zarbi, Mechanoids Quarks, (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) and Voord. (PROSE: Verdigris) At the conclusion of the adventure, Ohica sent Iris and her bus to the planet . There she got terribly drunk with a group of archaeologists, and they told her that while she'd been in the Sisterhood, the Doctor's mysterious superiors had exiled him to Earth for the crime of trying to help people. Even though that was all in her relative past, Iris thought it'd be a good idea to do something about it. So she summoned up the genie-like spirit of Makorna's verdigrised copper city, in the form of a being called , and commanded him to end the Doctor's exile. The next day Iris was terribly hungover with no memory of what she'd done. In her third body, based on Shirley Bassey in her prime, Iris fought giant owls in the Glass City of Valcea with a fat, mustachioed Doctor. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) Fifth Iris In the Manchester Central Library, Iris once found a talking squirrel, and helped him return to the magical land of Dazzlaria, the setting of Charleston Stanlift's Chronicles of Dazzlaria series. (PROSE: The Mancunian Candidate) When Iris was around nine centuries old, on a trip to London in November 2000, a drunk man named mistook the bus for the real No. 22 to Putney Common and stumbled aboard. He made fun of the kitschy way Iris had decked out her bus's interior and Iris, angered, took off. They landed in , where they had "adventures" with the and . Iris hoped that he'd be enraptured by the adventures and want to stay with her, but instead he declared that he had been kidnapped. They then had several "historical adventures," (PROSE: Verdigris) including to the Elizabethan Court (PROSE: Entertaining Mr. O) Almost none of the historical adventures pleased him, though he did enjoy meeting the "fabulous" . Iris decided that Tom would enjoy meeting her old friend and sometime lover the Doctor, and looked for a convenient Christmas to drop in on him. They arrived in 1973, where the Doctor — in his third incarnation, and therefore Iris's relative past — was exiled to Earth by his mysterious superiors. At this point she was already familiar with the Doctor's secret past, had met him in the future travelling with Romana and K9, and had been told about when the TARDIS fell off a cliff face on Peladon. As it turned out, it wasn't Christmas when Iris found the Doctor: it was May. The Doctor was on a break from his work with UNIT, staying in his country house with his assistant Jo Grant. Iris disliked Jo, whom she considered dim. Iris, Tom, the Doctor, and Jo became caught up in a ludicrously convoluted scheme Verdigris had concocted. Iris and the Doctor were able to stop him, and he had to think up another way. (PROSE: Verdigris) With his unpaid scientific advisor "pensioned off rather suddenly," a "non-person living in Wales" Alistair hired Iris as a replacement. Tom — who was going through a "purist" phase, refusing to believe in aliens — assisted Iris, though Alistair disapproved of him as a security risk. In 1973, Alistair sent Iris to deal with Mr O, a very forgettable-looking man who claimed that his real body was trapped in a universe of antimatter, and that he was going to hold them to ransom. Iris told him that there was no such thing as antimatter, so he sent jelly-like beings to whisk away the Ministry's furniture to his antimatter realm. Iris's future self showed up to help, in a silver catsuit bikini affair and leather boots. She had masses of golden blonde hair and green eyeshadow. She was touched by one of Mr O's antimatter jelly-beings and disappeared. Iris figured future-her had been zapped to the antimatter universe, but another Iris (old, haughty, wearing fantastic jewels) appeared on television and told her that they'd all been kidnapped to the Death Zone. (PROSE: Entertaining Mr. O) "Mr O," or Omega wasn't really even exiled to a universe of antimatter at all: he was sitting in a B&B in Bournemouth. With help from the Doctor, Iris was able to stop him. (AUDIO: ) So Iris became caught up in an adventure in the Death Zone with six of her other selves. She was Iris number five at the time, and and got to properly meet her number six: "a gorgeous, slinky sex kitten, who looked about thirty in human terms, with masses of honey-blonde hair. She was in a shiny plastic bikini cut very daringly, and thigh-length boots. She had a look of Jane Fonda about her." (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) After Verdigris succeeded in freeing the Doctor from Earth (the Time Lords rewarded him his freedom for helping stop Omega), Iris and Tom celebrated with the Doctor and Jo in an alien bar. (PROSE: Verdigris) Iris, the Doctor and Jo once visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus in 1935. Iris changed her mind about Jo, calling her a "nice girl." Picasso was there, and had brought Jean Cocteau. The Doctor got into an argument with Stein because she claimed she had personally been responsible for Dadaism, surrealism, and cubism. Iris sided with Stein and that she could rewrite cultural history with herself at the centre if she wanted to. Jo wanted to see the Cabaret so she, Iris and the Doctor caught a train to Berlin. They met Christopher Isherwood before he was famous. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) In this body Iris collected real estate: she aimed to have a "house in every century" on Earth. In the eighteenth century she was a Lady, owning a grand house in the North of England. In 1764 she tried to acquire the house of one Lady by marrying her companion, the nineteenth century-originating Captain , to Lady Huntingdon's daughter . It transpired that the Huntingdons were the last of a race of shapeshifting space tigers, and that Lady Huntingdon — bent on undoing her race's extinction — would only give up the house in exchange for Iris's bus. Iris refused, but Lady Huntingdon tried to take the bus by force. The Doctor was on hand with his friend Sarah, however, and succeeded in trapping Lady Huntingdon inside a Iris had lying around in the bus. Iris left Captain Turner, and he married Bella. (PROSE: ) Iris had adventures involving Giant Spiders on Metebelis III with her "glamorous companion" Timmy, the tombs of the Cybermen on with another glamorous young assistant, Jeremy, and s in feeding frenzy on "their fetid swamp world." She foiled the Dalek invasion of Earth in the 22nd century, and she was there when the broke out. She once saved envoys trapped on . One of Iris's companions was Kroton, a friendly Cyberman. Another was a shapeshifter disguised as a penguin. Iris and the Doctor once encountered fish people in Venice. Another time, when the Doctor was having something of a midlife crisis, they met in after his imprisonment. She met the Doctor in his seventh incarnation and thought he was terribly pretentious. She met his first self, newly on the run and with his hair not even white. He'd flung himself into the French Revolution and told her that his biggest thrill was escaping captivity over and over. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Iris once accidentally left her favorite gold lamé handbag, which she'd bought at a bazaar on Hyspero, on the planet Artaris. She had no idea at the time that it contained the afterlife inside. In fact, she only wore it for show and never bothered to look inside at all. Iris shared two Christmases with the Fifth Doctor aboard the bus: once with Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan, (AUDIO: ) and again with Tegan and Turlough. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Iris's body outlasted five of the Doctor's, but after she ate a raw and living mutant at tea with a prince, she was poisoned: it killed her slowly, over a period of months. She knew that she should survive, reborn in a body that looked like Jane Fonda — she'd met her future self in the Death Zone. But if the disease continued, it would wipe out every cell of her body and there would be nothing left to regenerate. Desperate for a cure, Iris made an agreement with the of : the Empress would cure her, if Iris brought her , the Major , and the ; they had once composed the mercenary group , and the Empress believed that they held , the first Scarlet Empress. Shortly after capturing her first quarry, Gila, Iris ran into the Doctor (in his eighth body) and . They joined her on a quest/road trip/adventure across Hyspero. Soon, the entire purpose of the venture had pivoted and Iris, the Doctor, Sam, and all of the Four were assisting Cassandra in overthrowing her descendant. Iris slipped into a coma but the Doctor saved her life with some of the honey-like substance the Scarlet Empresses used to preserve themselves. When she woke up, Iris crept off in the bus. She sent a video to the Doctor and Sam, showing herself regenerating into a younger body with honey blonde hair. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) Sixth Iris (Jane Fonda) After her regeneration, Iris decided she deserved some time to get herself together. She settled down in New York in 1966, hanging around the Factory with Andy Warhol. There she wrote a book, Wildthyme: Confessions of a Time Lady, based on the adventures of the Doctor. When the Doctor visited with Sam in 1968, planning to see Warhol, he was none too pleased with the book. Ultimately it was published with the genre shifted, thinly disguising the truth it was based on. (PROSE: ) While in the sixties, Iris helped Jacqueline Susann with her own novel, The Love Machine. Jackie was very grateful, presenting Iris with many gifts in thanks. They included a cigarette holder and a gold-and-cream embroidered kaftan. Iris found that wearing it helped her think better, although she preferred to wear catsuits for action and adventure. : )]] Iris fought alien incursions with the (PROSE: The Blue Angel) during the sixties. Iris was on the planet back when it was an ashen wilderness with petrified forests overrun with . She led the attack on the of the Daleks. The Daleks had been experimenting with hallucinogens and "weird sex"; it was a Philip K. Dick-style '60s tale. (PROSE: ) She had a harpoon, which she had to leave behind after making a "swiftish escape" from Skaro. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) While working for MIAOW, Iris was involved with some business with the Beatles, a robot guru, and a holiday camp in Wales and an adventure in which the cast of Crossroads was transported to the Moon by samurai jellyfish. (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) On 12 November 1969, Iris attended a party hosted by Dr Who to memorialise the end of the decade. (PROSE: In the Sixties) Iris was present for (and gave suggestions about) the recording of Geoff Love's 1978 orchestral version of the , disguised as a cellist/''Space 1999'' fan: the Ministry had sent her to investigate the subliminal messages Love was hiding in his reworkings of sci-fi themes. On one occasion Iris met when he was excited to have found a copy of Geoff Love's rendition of the theme; it had been one of his favourite records when he was eight. (PROSE: ) Iris was special scientific adviser to during the 1990s. She tended to vanish for weeks on end, (PROSE: Interference) or go "on vacation." (PROSE: ) In 1996, Sarah Jane Smith interviewed her for her programme , about the cults and culture of the "security" market. (PROSE: Interference) One companion of Iris's was named David, and another Nigel. As War between the universe and its encroached, and the peoples of the — such as the Glass Men of Valcea, the giant owls of Ichor, the , the , and the — began to come out of 's extruded Corridors, Iris desperately tried to keep the Eighth Doctor (accompanied by Fitz Kreiner and Compassion) from getting involved. She knew that there was nothing he could do to stop it, and didn't want to see him fail. (PROSE: The Blue Angel) : )]] At one point Iris travelled in the bus with the Eighth Doctor, and they argued about whose adventures were more real — or whether they both could be. (PROSE: ) : Iris Explains)]] Iris stayed with the Doctor and his adopted daughter Miranda Who for a while in the 1980s, when he was stuck on Earth. She tried to explain his past and amnesia to him, but only confused him more. (PROSE: Iris Explains, Mad Dogs and Englishmen) Iris once had sex with two men with ankh tattoos, both named Doug. (AUDIO: The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme) Iris had numerous adventures with Rex Halidom and the crew of the battleship Anathema. (PROSE: Battleship Anathema) Further life In one body, Iris was a huge woman in her late sixties. She had a long white braid which trailed behind her, and she'd yell at people when they stepped on it. The Doctor thought that she looked like she had been a great beauty when she was younger, and couldn't let go of it, wearing an excessive amount of makeup. But he still thought she was terribly glamorous, and that the fact that she carried herself as if she was very beautiful made her so. She proposed to him in Venice at dawn, on the Bridge of Sighs. (PROSE: The Scarlet Empress) This was just after Jo had left him. He claimed at one point that he had offered to team up with her, but she had interpreted it as a proposal. (PROSE: The Wormery) Iris abandoned the adventuring life for a singing career. As Brenda Soobie, she was a world-famous Scots Caribbean songstress (in her body modelled on Shirley Bassey), singing songs which hadn't even been written yet. By 1960, Brenda's official life chronicled her rise from a poor background in Glasgow, to singing in working men's clubs, to the stage of the Palladium, to Las Vegas. Brenda met Noël Coward in 1957, at the Royal Variety Performance, and they became good friends. She taught him to navigate the Very Fabric of Time and Space with pinking shears, allowing him to even travel past the point of his own death. For sixty years, Brenda was accompanied by a poodle from the dogworld, Martha, once handmaiden to the dogworld's slain Empress. Noël Coward wrote a song about Martha, also called "Martha." Brenda was going to sing it at the end of all her shows — it would become a huge hit, become the theme tune of the film adaptation of The True History of Planets, and ultimately become a revolutionary anthem on the dogworld. (PROSE: Mad Dogs and Englishmen) A man named John recalled seeing Iris sing in a pub just after the Second World War. She had a thing for him, but he wasn't into older women. (PROSE: Came to Believe) In 1960, Brenda was singing in Las Vegas when she was interrupted by Fitz Kreiner and a chef, Flossie, who were (somewhat haphazardly) investigating changes to The True History of Planets for the Doctor. Brenda and Coward soon discovered that they were actually pawns in the opposable-thumbed-hands of Martha and the dogworld's Princess, but the poodles' plan failed when the dog-themed version of True History was erased from time and they were killed by Imperial agents. Brenda encountered the Eighth Doctor, but his only memory of her was in a different body and under a different name, in the '80s, so he failed to recognise her. To console Brenda over the loss of Martha, Flossie and a poodle named Fritter joined her on the bus. (PROSE: Mad Dogs and Englishmen) Iris and Noel Coward had an adventure in Las Vegas involving singing goblins. (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) Mancunian incarnation Iris helped the Doctor defeat the Sontarans when they snuck in the back door and invaded Gallifrey. She was there when the Time Lords sent him back to avert the creation of the Daleks. She once visited Frontios. For no reason she could remember or even guess at afterwards, Iris joined a convent on a mountain on Artaris. She was a terrible fit for the occupation. She told outrageous and immoral stories of her past adventures, smuggled in bottles of liquor, listened to loud music, offered the other nuns "day trips" on her bus, and generally made a nuisance of herself until the Mother Superior got her out by assigning her an important-sounding quest: following a legendary map to find the Relic all of Artaris was obsessed with. : )]] Accompanied by the Fifth Doctor, the warlord Grayvorn, and Sister Jolene, Iris set off in the bus. They found the Relic in the heart of a forest, guarded by an army of flesh-eating zombies. The zombies captured Jolene and planned to sacrifice her, but the rest of the party managed to abscond with the Relic: Iris's old handbag, which she'd accidentally abandoned years ago in her own past, and thousands of years in the past of the planet. Iris and the Doctor tried to return the Relic to the Mother Superior, but Grayvorn tried to fight her for it and they both toppled off the mountain with it. Iris offered to let the Doctor travel with her on the bus, but he declined and they left Artaris in their separate conveyances. (AUDIO: ) Iris returned to Artaris thousands of years later, when it was a desolate post-apocalyptic wasteland. There she met Bernice Summerfield. Immediately they got exceedingly drunk and Iris roped Benny into a scheme to pinch the Relic. Things quickly degenerated into a capture-escape routine, featuring Benny's public humiliation and Iris driving her bus into a building. As Iris reluctantly revealed, her real motivation for stealing the Relic wasn't to wear it: it was because she knew that it represented something extraordinarily terrible. Something awful which would affect all of Artaris. Not that she could remember what, specifically, that was. She could remember some things, though, like how the entire mess started: Iris had helped broker a peace for a once-warmongering but reformed alien queen, and a faction unwilling to forgive so easily had brainwashed her. They'd been the ones to send her to Artaris with the Relic in the distant past, where she had left it. The Relic was meant to form part of a complicated explosive system, which would blow up the planet as the warrior queen passed by. Iris was able to put the kybosh on the whole centuries-long plan with minimal effort; the Relic responded to her because of her previous experience with it. Afterwards, Iris and Benny agreed that they deserved a good party. (AUDIO: ) An evil version of Iris from the future, calling herself "Bianca," converted her bus into an interdimensional nightclub. The club was called, appropriately enough, . It was connected via wormholes to entrances in a variety of places and times, including 1930s Berlin, Astridia, and Garganon. One evening, Bianca's show was attended by the Doctor (in his sixth incarnation, just after his trial) and (arriving separately) the erstwhile Ms. Iris Wildthyme. In Bianca's view, Iris had wasted the lives which rightfully belonged to her. She tried to manipulate the Doctor into killing Iris and extracting her remaining lives, much like the Doctor's own dark future self attempted on him. With the aid of the "pro-faction" of s Bianca aimed to bring a single moment of stability and harmony to the entire universe. Iris championed the anti-faction, which wanted to spread only violence and chaos. But both factions were beaten by their own dark, semi-real future: the shadows of the humanoid creatures they should have evolved into. To put a stop to it all, the Doctor time rammed his TARDIS into Bianca's. This threw so much doubt on the entire affair ever having happened at all that in the ruins, Bianca simply faded away. (AUDIO: The Wormery) In 1979 Iris created the company Suitors, Inc. to sell "Suitors" or "Erotic DoctorBots" based on the Fourth Doctor. She manufactured them at a factory called . It was fun, initially — until the Siamese cat Madame revealed herself to be a nefarious warrior queen of , took Iris's bus hostage, and demanded that Iris use the DoctorBots to kidnap her elderly customers and transport them to Pussyworld. The Fourth Doctor himself came to investigate the kidnappings, with Romana and . Sarah Jane Smith suspected Iris because of their meeting in 1764 and separately investigated, with w:c:tardis:Harry Sullivan. (PROSE: Suitors, Inc.) After running out of milk, Iris stopped off in October 1955 to pick up some more. She filched a pint from a remote house on an island in an English lake, and unwittingly became part of a murder scene. When she realized she'd forgotten to get sugar and returned (fifty years later), she found that she'd been mistaken for a ghost and blamed by the real murderer, Stanley Harris, and that she had arrived just in time to be the subject of an investigation by the TV show Most Horrid. (PROSE: Most Horrid) Travels with Tom again Iris was evidently reunited with Tom at some point. Together they helped a man investigate the murders of a number of pastiches of famous detectives. They'd all been bumped off by their housekeeper, Mrs H, who was tired of their annoying eccentricities the way they took her for granted. (PROSE: The Sleuth Slayers) Tom and Iris spent a week on in 1590 with a delegation from England. It was a heavenly place which would be considered scientifically impossible by anyone outside the 16th century, but that didn't bother anyone but Tom. (PROSE: Minions of the Moon) Iris kidnapped a dog from a young boy's backyard, then returned it at the front door and told him it had slipped out through cracks in the dimensions. She claimed to Tom that this would inspire the boy to become a writer of such skill he could rip through the very fabric of time and space and let in things from outside. Tom realized that he had met the boy at an older age himself. He tried to watch their first encounter on Iris's space-time kinetograph, but something went wrong and he jumped a time phase, and Iris had to rescue him. (PROSE: Beguine) While hanging out with Anaïs Nin and June and Henry Miller in 1930s Paris, Iris and Tom defeated creatures of film and origami which wanted to steal all of humanity's words. (PROSE: Blame Iris) Iris knew Joanna Lumley when she was a Bond girl. Iris ensured that Barry Canley was checked into rehab, and went through with it, so that he would go on to write the book Magnificat and she could read it. When Iris later got her 2050 copy of Magnificat signed, and explained to Canley that she had been responsible for him writing it, it was in her Edith Sitwell-like body. (PROSE: Came to Believe) Iris knew Aleister Crowley, dressed as a boy to be 's page, and slew the cockatrice that infested the Pit of Mysteries. Iris let Tom have a go at driving the bus through the , to the Hard Place resort positioned inside the vortex itself. However, because he was an inexperienced driver, he missed the warning signs. The elemental being which the resort derived its power from had gotten fed up of being leeched off of, and a pair of wizards were decommissioning the whole place. (PROSE: Rough Magic) When Iris took Tom with her on a return visit to Dazzlaria, she found it much changed. Good King Jason had been overthrown in favour of New Bobbins, who had instituted many neoliberal reforms based on the information he had gained during his visit to Manchester. After Jason escaped prison, however, he was reinstalled on the throne by a reactionary monarchist movement and New Bobbins was executed. (PROSE: The Mancunian Candidate) Iris and Tom stayed awhile in the 19th century, where Iris corrupted a couple of young women out of a Jane Austen pastiche. (PROSE: Iris and Irregularity) Iris interrupted Medea at the point before she would, in her own story, murder her children. She took her on a tour of her own legacy, showing her the archetype she would become and the plays that would be based on her. She showed her that she could live her own life instead of becoming that archetype. With Tom's help they faked the murder, and transported her to a new life in Athens. Without the real Medea fulfilling her story, the universe had to create a new personification of Medea-the-archetype. This was Iris's real goal, and she took the new Medea travelling with her. (PROSE: The Evil Little Mother and the Tragic Old Bat) Iris sunk the Titanic when she tried to run over a plesiosaur. (AUDIO: The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme) Iris and Tom's relationship eventually became strained, so when they landed close to his native time and place (the late '90s) he went off in a huff. (PROSE: Preface, AUDIO: Wildthyme at Large) Iris studied medicine under Lister. (AUDIO: The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme) Iris fell in love with a man named Sam Gold, and they were married at the Intergalactic Song Contest. But the night of the wedding, she was whisked away by the Masterbakers of Barastabon to find the six slices of the Celestial Gateau which had been scattered across the multiverse. (AUDIO: The Sound of Fear) A super-powerful being sent Iris on a quest to find the six pieces of the Key to the Clockworks, but she accidentally chipped the final segment, meaning the parts wouldn't fit together. (PROSE: Future Legend) Iris went on the run from a being from the outer dimensions, taking sanctuary with Robin Hood and his Merry Men. She placed all her thoughts and dreams in a memory crystal from the mines of Marlion, then popped by to drop it off with Tom (for whom it had been ten years since their last meeting). This was when Iris first met Panda, who was living with Tom. Ultimately they were forced to smash the crystal so that the being couldn't get its hands on her secrets, and Tom and Panda went with Iris to have some new adventures. (AUDIO: Wildthyme at Large) The first of these was Wizard of Oz-themed, and they faced the resurrected demon . (AUDIO: The Devil in Ms. Wildthyme) Iris once lost Mars to a Nimon ambassador in a game of baccara. (AUDIO: The Sound of Fear) Iris, Panda, and Tom had to stop a space freighter from crashing into prehistoric Earth, though it took Iris seventeen tries to get Tom off of it in time and she accidentally left Panda there for two weeks. The trio encountered an acupuncturist in Lowestoft who was actually one of Iris's people, retired. He'd become evil for some reason and Iris had to blow him up using only her lighter and some fireworks. (PROSE: Future Legend) In Xanadu they met Kubla Khan, who gave them an ornate hookah, and gave Panda a set of tiny emerald roller skates. (PROSE: Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta) During one of their adventures, Tom fell in love with someone he'd barely spoken to and decided to leave the bus once again. (AUDIO: The Sound of Fear) Travels with Panda Shortly after Tom left, Iris and Panda went to c:tardis:Radio Yesterday, where she was reunited with her husband Sam Gold. They foiled a Naxian invasion of the galaxy, but Sam was killed. (AUDIO: The Sound of Fear) During this adventure, Iris surreptitiously went on a date with the third Naxian from the left, Roger. Whenever Iris had an encounter with the Naxians, they would pop off for some time together, using the bus to return the moment after they left so that no one noticed. (AUDIO: The Two Irises) Iris's mysterious superiors from the Clockworks caught up with her for stealing her bus and disabled it, so that she and Panda were stuck in 1972. She began working for MIAOW again, (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) (the South Kensington branch) (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) like she had in the sixties, because she figured it was her best chance at getting the technology to fix the bus. Panda stayed with her, but in an independent capacity as an investigative journalist. MIAOW sent Iris and Panda to investigate a house where people were disappearing. They found an alien creature was using the area as fuel for its life support machine, and if they hadn't stopped it would've eventually consumed the universe. (PROSE: Apocalypse Slough) In 1973, the Jabberwocky was discovered under the London Underground. Iris and Panda went deep into the Earth, to Wonderland. MIAOW operatives followed them and began laying waste to Wonderland, but gave Iris her feasibility generator and she was able to fix the bus. (AUDIO: The Land of Wonder) MIAOW, Iris, and Panda discovered a plot by vegetables to take over the world by removing government figures from power. Iris got vegetabalised and they had to be rescued by Noel Coward and Marlene Dietrich. (PROSE: The Scarlet Shadow) Until 1978, Iris continued to fend off nasties from space and other dimensions, and Panda continued to write reviews of ballets and operas and the like. But eventually MIAOW's nefarious tendencies got a bit much for her, and she stormed off. (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) After a few months in which Iris kept bumping into her own past—there was an adventure with her other selves, the weresheep of Ambridge, and the Colonel from her days in MIAOW, and an encounter with the Cerise Guardian—Iris booked herself into the Rehab Dimension for a break. To keep all her enemies from taking advantage of her absence, Iris gave a press release to announce her imminent regeneration and left Panda with a facsimile of a male successor, "Iris Hilary Wildthyme." When things got too much for the "new Iris," Panda summoned the real Iris. They stopped Roger the Naxian from escalating a nuclear conflict in 2108, and after they revealed Hilary's true nature, he elected to stay with Roger and help him run his disco in Malaga. (AUDIO: The Two Irises) In New Jersey, 1903, Iris played five-card draw for three bridges, a small lake and the mining rights to Hoboken and Newark with some dogs from Dogworld. The dogs forfeited the match when one of them cheated, and the game was documented in Cassius Coolidge's painting A Friend in Need. A century later, a descendant of the offending dog was betrothed to the princess of Dogworld, and a team of dogs attempted to eradicate all copies of the scandalous painting. The dogs, Iris and Panda, and a team of mercenaries hired by MIAOW collided in Scunthorpe. Iris had to play cards against the dogs again, for all of their lives—but she was assured of victory because her cards were marked in such a way that the colour blind dogs couldn't detect. (PROSE: A Gamble with Wildthyme) Iris knew Agnes Inglewood in the '30s and '40s, when she had a studio on Denmark Street. Iris visited Agnes and their friend Dana in January 1960. Panda didn't want to come so she left him in London. (PROSE: Sovereign) Iris once spent three weeks in Heaven trying to win back the Ark of the Covenant from the angel Gabriel in a game of gin rummy. While trying to take the bus on a shortcut through the spirit plane, Iris got into an altercation with some Ectovores who claimed she'd parked in their space at a service station. She tried to call up Hilary for help, but instead got fraudulent psychic called [[w:c:tardis:Hilary Mercer|Hilary Mercer]]. (PROSE: The Unhappy Medium) In 2008, Iris and Panda visited Jenny at the Darlington branch of MIAOW. They discovered that it was built near the Dreadful Flap, a gash in the Very Fabric of Time and Space. Iris correctly guessed that there was only one man who could be responsible: her friend, Noel Coward. They went back to the sixties to change history, but only succeeded in ensuring the Flap was created when Noel stabbed the head of MIAOW Darlington, Kristoff Alucard, with his temporal pinking shears. (PROSE: The Dreadful Flap) When Panda sold himself on eBay, Iris tried to track him down. She looked in the Boulevard of Alternate Brutalities, but was unable to find him, even though he was there. The Boulevard was worn out and no longer functioning properly, so Iris shut it down. (PROSE: Library Pictures) Iris found Panda at the end of the universe, with the last of the Pussyworlders. She helped them escape the universe's collapse by evacuating them to equivalent of Pussyworld in the Obverse. (PROSE: Future Legend) Iris took Panda to see her friends on the Anathema, but found it completely different. All of their mirth had been replaced with militarism, thanks to their unending, gruelling war with the heretic Apollinarian Cyrenes. Iris attempted to help the two sides find common ground in their mutual adoration of Panda, but made sure to leave before they could find out she was engineering peace. (PROSE: Battleship Anathema) After stopping at a Scottish distillery to pick up some more gin, Iris accidentally imbibed an aqueous alien lifeform. (PROSE: And Not a Drop to Drink) In Mexico City, 1968, Iris and Panda met Señor 105 and faced the monster Axixmiqui. (PROSE: Iris Wildthyme y Señor Cientocinco contra Los Monstruos del Fiesta) Iris once fought an evil alternative universe Village People. Iris and Panda were visiting an amusement park when its founder awoke from decades of cryogenic suspension and began making the animatronics trap visitors there. Iris killed him by pouring gin into his life support system, and thus his bloodstream. (PROSE: Why? Because We Like You) On a planet filled with nice people who loved gardening, Iris and Panda defeated an evil stone statue and a man who lived in a clock and wanted to steal Iris's body. In 18th century Russia, Iris and Panda helped the stranded Marlene Dietrich against the Archduke of Autumn, a renegade from the Obverse. (PROSE: The Scarlet Shadow) Iris bumped into Fritz and his friends again at a party. When a ritual created an alternative timeline where the Spiritus Mundi destroyed the world, Panda got stuck there, and Iris and Fritz had to take the bus to get him back. (PROSE: Only Living Girls) The police once had to drag Iris out of the Moulin Rouge (the space station near Betelgeuse, not the one in Paris). She was there with Jane Austen. In San Francisco, Iris had to capture two humpback whales and take them back to the future. Iris spent a night in a cell with George Orwell. Iris had breakfast on the White House lawn with Abraham Lincoln after they fended off Martian invaders for the third time. Iris had coffee with Napoléon on the Russian front. Iris visited Persephone IV, a world in another dimension populated by vampire pandas. (AUDIO: The Panda Invasion) Panda got a scratch on his nose when George Bush ran over him on a bike. Iris supplied Santa Claus with Clockworks technology so he could keep up with delivering presents to all humanity's children after humans spread beyond Earth. (AUDIO: The Claws of Santa) Iris and Panda helped in an excavation of Stonehenge. They found an ancient gift shop, buried right under the modern one. Iris investigated a haunted cathedral. She initially determined that it was a ghost from the future bringing itself into existence, but when she couldn't stop it operating under that theory she determined/decided that the entire thing was retroactively faked by her future self. (PROSE: Iris Wildthyme and the Unholy Ghost) A man called Mr Heart used a facsimile of Iris to trap Panda inside a painting forever. (PROSE: Framed) Iris went to a bus depot, hoping to get proper measurements for her bus with which she could fix its broken dimensional transcendentalism, but found the place haunted by the ghost of a ticket inspector. (PROSE: Just the Ticket) Iris was able to partially save a village from being blown up by creating a timeline where it was saved separate from the one in which it was destroyed. (PROSE: The Party in Room Four) Iris fought a mutant meme and encountered Theo Possible and a girl named Kelsey in Zona Oscura, the boundary between conceptual and material planes. (PROSE: Party Kill Accelerator!) Iris went to Manleigh Halt in the 1920s to investigate its time-travelling police station. There she met the Manleigh Halt Irregulars and Mumu Manchu, and witnessed the Wild Puppet Hunt. (PROSE: The Delightful Bag) Iris accidentally zombified the natives of a place called Powhatan but was able to reverse it. (PROSE: Iris Wildthyme's Rainy Day Adventure) In London, 1934, Iris foiled an invasion attempt by the insectoid Incato. (PROSE: The Colour Scheme) Iris and Panda stopped a creature from turning East Falmouth into a Lovecraftian place full of horrors more like its own habitat. (PROSE: The Shadow of Times Before) Iris saved the earth from destruction somehow, but Betty Blew died in the process. She took a man named Richard to Cardiff to work for MIAOW. When Danny Regan became convinced Iris was kidnapping people from the Manchester Gay Village and confronted her, she stranded him in some kind of abandoned future version of Canal Street. She came back for him later and showed him the universe, then helped him orchestrate the events in his own past that led him there. (PROSE: The Fag Hag from Hell) Iris was once locked in a glass prison with a certain grumpy archaeologist. In the "Welsh basement" of a nice boy in a trenchcoat, Iris lost her stopwatch. On a planet that used to be controlled by a "Conscience" that stopped people from doing wrong, Iris was imprisoned for impersonating a deity (Eric Morecambe). One of her fellow inmates, Sabi, was the daughter of the person who used to run the Conscience. She tried to use it to spread boring niceness throughout the universe. (PROSE: The Niceness) When something let loose one of the universe's most malevolent forces, nostalgia, Iris and Panda investigated. (PROSE: Channel 666) Iris ran a bar called The Tradesman's Entrance on Berwick Street in Soho around 1916. She tended to play anachronistic music, and one night summoned her friend Molly Malone by singing her song. (PROSE: The Found World) After the funeral of John Austin, Iris searched his coffin for a "genie" and asked the gillie of his estate to let her know if he ever found it, or found someone else looking for it. (PROSE: The Irredeemable Love) For Panda's birthday, Iris took him to San Francisco on 31 December 1999 to party. But she accidentally spilled gin in the engine of the bus, and therefore the space-time vortex. This created a rift in the Very Fabric which brought an evil alternative version of Panda through from his reality, and the evil Panda attempted to launch an invasion of alternative Pandas from across the multiverse. While scuffling with his counterpart, Panda fell into the rift, taking him to who-knows-where and leaving Iris to search the multiverse for him. (AUDIO: The Panda Invasion) Iris looked for Panda in the Ice Caves of Shabadabadon, the Land of Fiction, and Penge. The wife of Santa Claus, Mary, became convinced (wrongly) that Iris had had an affair with her husband. She snatched Panda out of the vortex as bait to lure Iris in, and came up with a mad scheme to revert all of humanity to children. Iris was able to stop this, help them mend their relationship, and get all the galaxy's presents delivered in time. (AUDIO: The Claws of Santa) Iris participated in an auction for the TARDIS, but dropped out when she discovered that the key was still being held by the Twelfth Doctor and thus wouldn't be part of the sale. (PROSE: Buyer's Remorse) Iris used the Twitter handle @realwildthyme. On 17 November 2011, she sent a message to Chinwagz Magazine on their article about the encounter between "Jane" and the Hussar. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil) External links * The Iris Wildthyme Pages * Obverse Books Category:Human writers Category:Individual Homeworlders Category:Individual time travellers Category:Singers Category:Individual detectives